of a young chicken, being fluffy and of a yellowish grey colour, speckled with black. At 12.40 the second young one appears, pushing itself out from under the mother bird as she rises a little in the nest. At half-past one the male gull, which has been near all the while, walks slowly and importantly to the nest, which he passes and then, turning back towards it, disgorges on to the rock a small fish, which he takes up in just the tip of his bill and pushes towards both the chick on the rock and the mother on the nest, all slowly and with a dry sort of manner, as though the bird were a cynic. The mother gull leans forward from the nest and takes it, and, first, holds it on the ground, while the chick outside pecks at it. Then she swallows it herself. The male now produces in the same way a small something—I suppose a gobbet of fish—and draws the chick's attention to it by touching it with his bill and pushing it a little towards him. The chick then swallows it, upon which the male flies off and takes his accustomed stand on a large projecting point of rock close at hand." This is a conjugal, a domestic, picture. The other, which I shall now give, and in which the hero was an Arctic skua, was, perhaps, "more condoling."
"The one bird stands still and upright, whilst the other, holding the neck constrainedly down, but with the head raised as far as is compatible with this, keeps moving round and round it. After revolving thus several times, keeping, always, very close to and, sometimes, actually touching the standing bird, this one also stands still, always in the same attitude, and opens his beak. The other one, standing as before, now raises the head and opens the beak also, upon
